Dr. Anupam Basu, the first Mark Steinberg Weil Fellow in Digital Humanities, will offer two workshops in October through the Humanities Digital Workshop. No prior background in programming is required or expected. Each workshop will consist of three weekly 90-minute sessions. To register, please contact Douglas Knox (dknox at wustl dot edu). Please circulate to students, faculty, or staff in the humanities who may be interested.
Hello, World: Introduction to Programming for Humanists
October 2, 9, and 16, 2012, 4:00–5:30 pm
As computational approaches gain prominence within the humanities, there has been much discussion about the importance of technological literacy, especially the ability to program. This workshop will introduce the basics of the Python programming language and explore the ways in which it can be used to facilitate humanities research. Designed for absolute beginners, it will cover variables, functions, control flow, and data structures. We will also consider how Python compares to other common programming environments and how we can approach humanities problems with simple programming techniques. No prior experience or technical expertise is required. The goal of the workshop will be to get you comfortable enough with the basics to allow you to explore further.
How to Do Things with Words: Basic Text Processing in Python
October 23, 30, and November 6, 2012, 4:00–5:30 pm
Much of digital humanities research focuses on text corpora – literary texts, historical archives etc. This workshop will introduce simple text processing techniques with Python to enable scholars to read, write, search, and manipulate text-data in useful ways. We will begin with basic string handling in Python and learn how string processing techniques can be adapted to the kinds of questions humanities scholars ask of texts. We will end with a brief tour of the possibilities of advanced text processing and data-mining techniques using the Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK).
You can also learn Python at Codecademy http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python.
Posted by: Tim | October 18, 2012 at 02:42 PM